One of the Punjab villages the Indo Canadian Friendship Society of B.C's provided with water and sewer systems.

Vancouver developer Gary Pooni’s business may be planning large urban projects, but his passion is development of a much smaller but more crucial kind: improving the infrastructure of rural villages in India’s Punjab region.

“Although I work in land development and real estate now, I always had this interest in Third World development since my parents and family had come from a Third World country,” the president of Brook Pooni Associates explained.

Their aim is improving villagers’ health, so rather than merely setting up clinics to treat diseases, they decided to go straight to the source of most illnesses: drinking water polluted with raw sewage. The project’s focus is providing clean water via underground sewage and sanitation treatment, to improve public health and infrastructure and help lift up entire communities: 17 since the project got under way in 1999. Where possible, they also try to pave roads, intstall solar-powered lights, put computers in schools, add parks and playgrounds, plant trees, teach public health lessons, start community centres and put in underground phone and electrical lines.

“We thought, instead of just putting all this money into health care and hoping things would be better, it would be so much easier if they just had clean living conditions,” said Pooni, an SFU alumni who studied geography and international development.

Pooni’s father was born in India in the village of Jindowal in the Punjab and Pooni grew up on a farm in New Westminster, picking blueberries and helping on the family farm. Now the real-estate developer is returning to his roots, helping farmers and rural villagers in his father’s homeland. His motivation, he says, comes from seeing what his life could have been like if his parents hadn’t immigrated to Canada, and a trip to his ancestral village as an 11-year-old made a lasting impression on him.

“We are so fortunate to be living in Canada. We take a lot of things for granted. Picturing me living there, or my son living there … well, if there was somebody somewhere who had a little bit of time or money who could help, I would have appreciated that for the rest of my life.”

Pooni coordinates the projects from Canada while Gill works on the ground in India six months of the year.

“Villages in Punjab have no infrastructure as we know of in Canada,” Gill, a New Westminster resident who founded the society in 1974, said in an email from India.

“There is no management of waste water and consequently the villages stink and are literary floating in sewer water. Diseases we don’t have in the West because of management of waste-water are killing 80,0000 Indians annually because of bad sanitation,” he explained. “India stands as the fifth worst country in the world as far as sanitation is concerned.”

Most of the villages, he notes, “have access to plenty of water, but there is no provision to treat waste water. Consequently, the villages are literally floating in sewer water. With few exeptions, the villages stink.”

Gill, immigrated to Canada from the village of Kharoudi in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab in 1949 and became a Canadian citizen in 1954. He was the first Indo-Canadian to earn a medical degree from UBC in 1957, and the first Indo-Canadian to practice medicine in Canada, running a family practice in New Westminster for four decades. In 1990, Gill became the first Indo-Canadian to receive the Order of B.C. and he received an honorary doctorate from UBC in 1996 in recogition of his medical and community work.

The president of the Indo-Canadian Friendship Society of B.C. now devotes his time to philanthropic work, and in 1999, he began work on improving infrastructure on his home village of Kharoudi. Since 2000, Gill says proudly, 17 Indian villages have received similar upgrades, most in the region surrounding the city of Jalanadhar.

“There is marked decrease in the incidence of diseases, especially gastroenteritis, that kills 400,000 Indians every year,” Gill explained.

The Society, a registered Canadian charity, helps Indians in Canada and abroad, and is most active in rural development in the Punjab, spending more than $1 million over the past few years on improving infrastructure in underdeveloped villages. As of 2006, the Indian government agreed to match funds raised for the village projects.

According to the Society, 70 per cent of India’s population has no access to improved sanitation facilities, and poor sanitation, including exposure to human waste, kills a half a million infants each year. It also costs the Indian government about 5 billion Rupees each year in medical costs and loss of work hours.

The society claims it has seen a 30 per cent decrease in infectious diseases and parasites in village populations that finally get access to treated water and proper sewage removal, and illnesses like typhoid, cholera, hookworm disease (which is a leading cause of anemia), and diarrhea have decreased.

“Morbidity rates have decreased substantially. It’s a whole new village just by improving the water,” Pooni said.

Further, the group points out that cleaner water can have far-reaching impact for productivity. In India, 41 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 are anaemic, as well as 80 per cent of all Indian infants under three. Some Canadian researchers estimate India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, together, lose $4.5 billion of dollars each year because of low productivity due to anemia.

By improving village health and connectivity, the society also hopes to keep people invested in their communties and stop the flood of villagers heading to overcrowded Indian cities and slums.

The group works directly with villagers on the ground on its projects, circumventing what it points to as endemic graft and corruption. Local companies like Vancouver based Quest Water Solutions have come forward to help, Quest providing new technologies for water systems. SFU signed on as a partner to the project in 2007 and now, Pooni said, the group is now working with SFU to create links with an Indian university to instiutionalize the program.

India, with it’s 1.2 billion residents is the 10th-largest economy in the world, worth about $1.8 trillion in 2011, with 467 million workers. This increasingly-industrialized and fast growing nation has seen education, econmic production and standards of living in its cities boom, while on the other hand its rural citizens still struggle with deep poverty and poor access to sanitation and health care. India, for example, has the largest concentration of people living on less than $1.25 per day — at least 42 per cent of the population, although that’s down from 60 per cent in the early 1980s. Even today, half of India‘s children are underweight and more than 45 per cent suffer malnutrition.

The northwestern state of Punjab is home to 27 million people, and Sikhism is the faith of 60 per cent of the population. Its primary industry is agriculture, as India’s primary grower of wheat it’s the country’s breadbasket. More than 65 per cent of the population here lives in rural areas. The traditional male-dominated society has also created serious problems with gender equality: the average literacy rate is 75 per cent, but only 68 per cent for women. And there are 14.6 million men to 13 million women citizens in the state, pointing to the effects of generations of female infanticide.

Pooni stresses that India is more than just a South-Asian tiger, that the success and modernization that has accompanied India’s rise on the global economic stage have not spread outside the middle-class in cities.

“The stories you hear from India now are the economic stories of great success. The rising of a new middle-class and economic power, but there is still a disparity between urban and rural regions, and most of India is still rural. The Punjab is a rural population and people in those villages don’t even have access to clean water.”

Pooni stresses that even a small group working together can have a big impact abroad in needy communities.

“I would say its not as hard or as daunting as task as people think. There are so many nations in the world that are desperate for assistance. Find a role that is best-suited to you and your personality and ability and try not to do everything at once,” he said.

“As soon as you start helping people, there are going to be others who want to get on board and help you. It’s a very Canadian thing to help others. Our province in particular is a cultural mosaic and there is a strong sense of wanting to help others abroad and that makes us incredible international development partners.”

“We are just a little mom-and-pop-shop NGO doing a few villages a year,” he added. But, “knowing that we’ve been able to help more than 1,000 people in each village and are helping them live longer, and more productively is very rewarding. I know we’ve been able to help save lives.”

Learn more about the Society‘s work with rural Indian villages, or contact them to help with the cause.

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